In this opinion piece by Bruni, he points out an obvious path of a crusade -

Excerpt from opinion by Bruni in NYTimes

I guess a zealot, by nature, can’t hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself.

He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That’s what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order.

He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven.

Not everyone agrees. In this era of the extraordinary, Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump administration’s assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran.
In a social media post on Friday, he wrote: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

That was hardly the pope’s first reprimand. During a Mass just before Easter, he voiced his concern that the Christian mission had been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” And before that, he cautioned that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

The pope’s preoccupation obviously reflects all the talk of God, God, God from Hegseth and from Trump, whose piety is profound when that’s convenient. Hegseth at one point used a Pentagon news conference in which he celebrated Iranians’ experience of “death and destruction from above” to beseech Americans to pray for our troops daily, on bended knee, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

As my Times colleagues Greg Jaffe and Elizabeth Dias wrote: “More than any top American military leader in recent history, Mr. Hegseth has framed U.S. military operations in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as bigger than politics or foreign policy. Often he has imbued these actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.”


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opinion/pete-hegseths-religious-war.html?smid=url-share